All of us at Terra Sig world headquarters are sending out hearty congratulations to the boys over at Deep Sea News – Peter Etnoyer, Craig McClain, and Kevin Zelnio – on the announcement of their September move to the Discovery Channel online.

I’ve had the good fortune of meeting all three gentlemen in person, even breaking bread with Craig. I can tell you that they are individually and collectively superb stewards of the deep sea and tireless promoters of conservation and habitat preservation. Best wishes to you fellas – we’ll miss you but we’ll keep reading (plus the Zelnio family is soon to become near-neighbors in meatspace).
On the other side of the coin, it’s great to have the very recent additions of Blake Stacey’s Science After Sunclipse and Matt Springer’s Built on Facts. Welcome, gentlemen.

But with the relocation of Deep Sea News, and with the earlier departure of the awe-inspiring Carl Zimmer, there exists an opportunity to add a greater dimension of diversity of person and voice to the ScienceBlogs consortium beyond having greater representation by aging white dudes. I claim no inside information as to the deliberations amongst our hosts and community managers at ScienceBlogs central in choosing or not choosing news blogs – after all, I was selected with little rhyme or reason and, sadly, I’m an aging white guy.

Beyond initial founding members like Janet Stemwedel and Tara Smith, I’m delighted by the last round of additions of female bloggers to the Sb stable. But now that we’ve added more underrepresented white men (albeit in the underrepresented topical area of physics), I wonder if it might be time to consider other outstanding science bloggers who don’t look like me, PZ Myers, or Dave Munger (who all look the same, btw – we have never been seen all three at the same time.).

So dear readers of our quiet little corner of ScienceBlogs, who might you suggest out there that might increase the diversity of this bloggy consortium?

You can score me as aging as you like, that Goth white on black stuff is right. out. for blogs. un-freakin-readable.

one thing that would be a two-fer is that Sb is really (really) light on social science. I mean, yeah, we gots plenty of amatayoor political types and there’s Nisbet but what I’d like to see is somebody who can really advocate and explain the methodologies they use (promoting science understanding), while focusing perhaps on a topic of more, shall we say, diverse interests (topic diversity) who maybe perhaps might be an underrepresented academic him/herself (bonus).

ahh, dangit Abel, now I’m going to have to write something up…thanks for opening the conversation though!

Tegumai has a point – perhaps I should’ve said, “aged.” But when you’re 25, you don’t really consider yourself aging.

Don’t feel bad, Pal – I believe that you and I are within a standard deviation of one another in age.

Good point about social sciences, Drug. Teh Mungers do a really nice job on psychology but I’m maybe reading that your idea is more related to the quantitative methodology of science understanding? I guess I’ll have to look at your own post.

As an aside, I’m 24 and I frequently feel “aging”. I think grad school does that in a bad way. In a good way, “I’m older than I’ve ever been, and now I’m even older, and now I’m even older, and now I’m even older…” (TMBG is the best way to simultaneously feel old and young)

I’m maybe reading that your idea is more related to the quantitative methodology of science understanding?

No, I just meant that people all-to-frequently like to dismiss social science results out of ignorance of their methods. As you say, psychology, which suffers some of the criticism-from-the-arrogance-of-ignorance has a good advocate in the Munger blog.

I second the call for more social science, if only because we hear so much stuff on the news and it would be wonderful to have more people dissect in a detailed quantifiable way the vague claims being reported in the media-as well as the disputes given attention in the media. For instance, a few months ago NPR Talk of the Nation talked about statistics that immigrants commit fewer crimes than people on average, but the two people on the program disagreed about the validity of the methodology. It’d be cool to see something like this dissected on ScienceBlogs.

In fact, I would support something like SocialScienceBlogs.com in order to have social science methodology more specifically highlighted.

cog daily, corpus callos, dev intell, dm, frontal ctx, mix mem, neurotopia, neurophilo, two minds, pure P all have a heavy or exclusive neuroscience bent when talking actual science. the fizzycysts who were whining about representation DID have a point you know…

Though you know, are there any botany blogs out there? That would be really new and interesting, to me at least. There may be some that I don’t know about, but they appear to be awfully quiet on the feeds…

scicurious, one of my original blog mentors was BotanicalGirl, a plant molecular biology grad student who disappeared and pulled all her content after being outed following her justified criticism of a departmental faculty candidate seminar. I’d love to see her back now that the dust has settled.